Elizabeth McCall was master taster at Woodford Reserve for eight years prior to being named the brand’s master distiller in 2023. The Bourbon Flight did not pass up the opportunity to ask her how best to appreciate a fine bourbon.
The Bourbon Flight: How do you instruct new bourbon drinkers — or even experienced bourbon drinkers — to taste and enjoy and really pick up on the nuances of bourbon, the tannins and sugars and different flavors?
Elizabeth McCall: I always encourage people to dissect their bourbon glass. If you’re going to drink a whiskey neat for the first time, you should get a glass that has a tulip shape. It focuses the aromas. A rocks glass makes it hard to do because it’s too open. Even if you have a wine glass, it’s better than most.
To start, don’t disturb the liquid too much; not like white wine where you start with swirling it. With high-proof spirits, don’t disturb it. Just waft the glass under your nose back and forth, and you’ll get the lightest aromatics right off the top of the glass. If you’re going to get a floral note or some of those light fruits, light vanillas, it’s all up there.
Then you get your nose deeper into the glass and take a nice deep breath in and really breathe in the richness of it. That’s where you’re going to get brown sugars and baking spices and maybe even a little leather. Some of the chocolate, those sweet aromatics start to develop.
Then go ahead and swirl your glass. Now that you’ve gotten the top and the middle, you swirl, and when you swirl it, you’ll notice that it gets really spicy. When you do that, you activate all the alcohol, the ethanol in there, and it gets the molecules excited and it becomes a lot more spicy on your palate. You’re going to get pepper and mint and some of those really crisp citrus notes at times. It can be very aggressive.
If you do that (swirl) when you first pick up your glass, you might misjudge the whiskey completely because you’re going to think, ‘That’s really spicy and I’m not going to like that.’ But you do that after you’ve already appreciated it, and you just see the spice character.
Then I invite people to taste it in three sips. The first sip is always just to warm up your palate, because if you haven’t had anything on your palate that day, a high-proof 90.4 whiskey like Woodford Reserve is going to be very aggressive on your palette. I always tell people, please don’t make an ugly face the first sip; just give it a minute. Put it on your palate, roll it around, don’t judge it. This is just warming up your palate.
Then I invite them to take a second sip, because the second sip is to focus on the flavor: Is it bitter? Is it sour? Is there a sweetness to it? Is it salty? Anything like that? Those kind of flavor notes. They’re just basic flavors.
And then I have them take a third sip, and the third sip is where you focus on the finish. How does it feel when it goes down your throat? When it leaves your mouth and you close your mouth and breathe out your nose? The retronasal activity and all that flavor — that’s where the real flavor blossoms.
That last sip is a really important part of your tasting: Close your mouth, breathe out your nose. With Woodford, that’s when you get those nice, candied-pecan multinotes that sit and linger on your palette. It makes you — it should make you — want to take another sip, if you’ve made your whiskey right.
